Chris Warshaw for Monkey Cage: There are several ways to measure partisan advantage in a districting plan, including the efficiency gap, partisan symmetry, declination and the mean-median difference. These metrics all capture distortions in the vote-seat relationship. In a recent work, Nicholas Stephanopoulos and I averaged … Continue reading
Nicholas Stephanopoulos
One recurring argument in the ongoing debate over partisan gerrymandering suits is that, if they can be brought, they will inundate the federal courts. Wisconsin advanced this floodgates claim in Whitford, asserting that courts would have to engage in “unprecedented … Continue reading
Today’s decision striking down Ohio’s congressional districts as unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders is notable in several respects. First, it was again unanimous. By my count, this is the fourth consecutive decision (following those in Maryland, Michigan, and North Carolina) in which … Continue reading
Last week, a three-judge district court unanimously held that twenty-seven Michigan state house, state senate, and congressional districts are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. The consequences of the decision are important. If it’s upheld, Michigan will have fair district maps in 2020 … Continue reading
My article on unifying disparate impact law has just come out in the Yale Law Journal. Here’s the abstract: The last decade has seen the largest wave of franchise restrictions since the dark days of Jim Crow. In response to … Continue reading
Tonja Jacobi and Matthew Sag for SCOTUS OA: Rucho v. Common Cause and Lamone v. Benisek are the last chance the Court has before the 2020 census to do something about partisan gerrymandering. So, with the future of democracy in the balance, how … Continue reading
More than thirty years ago, Sandy Levinson wrote an article called “Gerrymandering and the Brooding Omnipresence of Proportional Representation.” The article is old but its title was as apt as ever in today’s oral arguments in Rucho and Lamone, in … Continue reading
What will happen in the 2020 redistricting cycle if the Supreme Court follows the advice of the defendants in the Maryland and North Carolina cases and holds that partisan gerrymandering claims are nonjusticiable? Some may think that, in that event, … Continue reading
A nice analysis by FiveThirtyEight using the partisan bias metric and covering North Carolina’s congressional plan (extremely skewed in Republicans’ favor), the court-drawn remedial plan in Pennsylvania (almost perfectly neutral), and all congressional plans currently in effect (exhibiting a significant … Continue reading
A new column of mine in Slate, based on my new paper with Chris Warshaw. In a nutshell, we found that Kagan was right. A party disadvantaged by gerrymandering fails to contest more districts. The candidates it does nominate have weaker credentials. … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Jon Eguia: In a previous post I introduced a measure of partisan advantage in redistricting. This measure compares the election outcome to a benchmark seat distribution that is not directly influenced by redistricting. More … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Jon Eguia: I propose a measure of partisan advantage in redistricting. A distinctive feature of this measure is that it captures only the partisan advantage that is due to the redistricting map in … Continue reading
The federal court redrawing portions of Virginia’s House of Delegates map recently announced the new configuration of the district lines. PlanScore evaluated both the old plan and the new one. As you can see below, the improvement is dramatic. The … Continue reading
In yesterday’s post, I described the data and methods that Chris Warshaw and I use in a new paper on the effects of partisan gerrymandering on parties’ associational activities. Today I’ll discuss our findings and their implications. In a nutshell, … Continue reading
In her concurring opinion in Whitford, Justice Kagan suggested that partisan gerrymandering might be unconstitutional not just because it dilutes the votes of a party’s supporters but also because it burdens their associational rights. “Members of the ‘disfavored party’ in … Continue reading
It’s not interesting that Mitch McConnell isn’t a fan of H.R. 1. He was the lead plaintiff against the last major campaign finance reforms that Congress passed. So of course he isn’t going to like H.R. 1’s heightened disclosure requirements, … Continue reading
I mentioned the other day that H.R. 1 would revolutionize American redistricting by requiring congressional maps to be designed by independent commissions. The bill would spark equally radical change in how congressional campaigns are financed, by creating two separate public … Continue reading
H.R. 1—the omnibus electoral reform bill recently unveiled in the House—has received surprisingly little attention on this blog. Sure, it’s not going to be passed by the Senate or signed by President Trump. But it probably is going to be … Continue reading
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s order agreeing to hear the North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case, I wanted to flag some key differences between this suit and last year’s Wisconsin case: Standing: The Court held that the Wisconsin plaintiffs … Continue reading
I wanted to flag this terrific paper by Gregory Warrington on the various quantitative measures of partisan asymmetry that have been proposed in recent years. Warrington calculates each metric over more than 1000 historical elections as well as over a … Continue reading
Here’s a post of mine in the HLR Blog on redistricting legislation that the newly Democratic House could and should pass. I’ll have another post soon on voting rights reform in Congress. Lastly, is it politically realistic for the House to … Continue reading
I see that Justin already beat me to the punch, but I wanted to add some more thoughts about the implications of yesterday’s elections for redistricting: First off, yesterday was the most successful day in U.S. history in terms of … Continue reading
Over the summer, on remand from the Supreme Court, a district court in Virginia struck down eleven House of Delegates districts on racial gerrymandering grounds. The court also gave the Virginia General Assembly until October 30 to pass a remedial … Continue reading
Here’s the abstract for a new paper of mine, forthcoming in a Harvard Law & Policy Review symposium on representation, power, and corruption: Academic studies of redistricting tend to be either doctrinal or empirical, but not both. As a result, … Continue reading
I wanted to flag for the blog’s readers some significant developments that took place this week in the North Carolina and Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering cases. In North Carolina, the trial court agreed to stay the remedial process on the condition … Continue reading
Here is the abstract for a forthcoming article of mine in the Yale Law Journal on vote denial cases brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act: The last decade has seen the largest wave of franchise restrictions since the dark … Continue reading
As Dan mentioned, the League of Women Voters and Common Cause each filed a brief yesterday explaining how Gill v. Whitford affects the North Carolina partisan gerrymandering case. I wanted to flag the litigants’ subtly different (but complementary) ways of establishing standing. The … Continue reading
I mentioned in my post the other day that it shouldn’t be very difficult to satisfy Whitford’s new standing requirements—at least for most plaintiffs in most districts. Cracking and packing are ubiquitous in any district map where significant vote dilution … Continue reading
The Court’s decision today holding that the plaintiffs in Gill v. Whitford have not proven their standing is disappointing. I’ll identify what I think are the weaknesses in the Court’s reasoning in a subsequent post. Here, though, I want to … Continue reading
The following is a guest post from Bill Whitford, a retired law professor at the University of Wisconsin and the lead plaintiff in Gill v. Whitford: Richard Pildes recently suggested that while the Supreme Court may begin subjecting partisan gerrymanders to … Continue reading
An interesting new study by Kevin Baas and Colin McAuliffe: There are several legal and technical challenges to the establishment of a standard for limiting partisan gerrymandering, and a few methods have been proposed thus far. All methods for examining … Continue reading
Reading the tea leaves, Rick Pildes and others have speculated that the Court may decide Whitford on standing grounds. I’ve previously explained why this would be a bad idea. But here I want to make two other points about the … Continue reading
I just posted a new article of mine, “Accountability Claims in Constitutional Law,” that recently came out in the Northwestern University Law Review. The abstract is below. While the piece addresses a range of constitutional doctrines, readers of this blog … Continue reading
At first glance, a district-specific theory of partisan gerrymandering (like the one presented in Benisek) seems to approach the issue of standing very differently from a statewide gerrymandering theory (like the one presented in Whitford). After all, a plaintiff in … Continue reading
Rick (Pildes) has a nice post thinking through whether a First Amendment theory of partisan gerrymandering renders the practice more like racial gerrymandering or racial vote dilution. I just want to add a few thoughts to Rick’s discussion: 1. There’s … Continue reading
Say you’re trying to determine whether a district plan that has been used in multiple elections has been highly skewed in a party’s favor. Would you look only at how the plan performed in its first election? Or would you consider all of the … Continue reading
Over the past week, I’ve repeatedly blogged about PlanScore’s upload feature, which allows users instantly to receive analyses of the partisan implications of proposed district maps. I also wanted to mention the site’s other half: comprehensive data about current and … Continue reading
Rick noted that there’s been some talk of a VRA challenge to the new Pennsylvania congressional districts. An initial obstacle to such a claim is that the relevant new districts are nearly identical, demographically, to their predecessors. PlanScore’s pages for the … Continue reading
According to PlanScore’s basic model, the remedial plan adopted today by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is impressively symmetric—both in absolute terms and compared to its predecessor. Its likely efficiency gap is -2% (versus its predecessor’s -10%), its likely partisan bias … Continue reading
Yesterday was the deadline for parties to submit their proposed remedial maps in the ongoing litigation over Pennsylvania’s congressional plan. In sum, seven maps were submitted: two by the plaintiffs, one by the governor, one by the lieutenant governor, one … Continue reading
If the Supreme Court specifies a standard for partisan gerrymandering claims this term, it will become very important to be able to evaluate the partisan implications of new district plans. Whether these new plans are remedial (designed after an existing … Continue reading
I was very happy to see Jim Gardner’s guest post on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision striking down the state’s congressional plan. Jim has written several terrific articles on the state constitutional law of partisan gerrymandering, so I can’t think … Continue reading
Having had some more time to digest the (205-page!) decision striking down North Carolina’s congressional plan, I thought I’d share a few additional observations. First, the decision demonstrates the manageability of the partisan gerrymandering test that was proposed in Whitford … Continue reading
I’ll have more to say soon about the important district court decision striking down North Carolina’s congressional plan on partisan gerrymandering grounds. (This is a case in which I’ve been involved as a lawyer.) For now, let me just note … Continue reading
I noted a couple days ago that Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District is unconstitutional under the Benisek plaintiffs’ district-specific test, while Maryland’s congressional map is also (probably) unlawful under the Whitford plaintiffs’ statewide test. (The Benisek test requires discriminatory intent with … Continue reading
The Supreme Court’s new partisan gerrymandering case features a district-specific (rather than a statewide) claim, as the plaintiffs challenge only Maryland’s Sixth Congressional District. It’s worth noting, though, that had the plaintiffs attacked Maryland’s entire congressional map, they (likely) would … Continue reading
Philadelphia Inquirer: It’s virtually undisputed that Pennsylvania’s congressional map satisfies this test. The map was drawn in secret by Republicans using reams of sophisticated data. It was then jammed through the General Assembly, largely on party-line votes, in a matter of days. … Continue reading
Yesterday I pointed out that the efficiency gap complies with a series of criteria that, Eric McGhee and I argue in a forthcoming article, can be used to evaluate measures of partisan gerrymandering. To determine if the same is true … Continue reading
Yesterday I laid out a series of criteria that, Eric McGhee and I argue in a forthcoming article, can be used to evaluate measures of partisan gerrymandering. Today I’ll briefly explain why the efficiency gap satisfies these criteria. Start with … Continue reading
Eric McGhee and I just posted a new article, The Measure of a Metric, that discusses the measurement of partisan gerrymandering and that’s forthcoming in the Stanford Law Review. In this post and a couple more, I thought I’d highlight … Continue reading